


Eerie, Almost Beautiful

by elle_stone



Category: Rent - Larson
Genre: F/M, Love, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-05
Updated: 2007-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-07 18:29:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's still above the ground, but he's not sure he knows how to live in the sky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eerie, Almost Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for challenge number 11 on the rentchallenge community on livejournal. The challenge was to write a story around the line "When your hands touch mine, they become wings and we fly." It was also to include kissing and coffee.

Roger stumbles home in the early morning hours, his eyes so bleary and so blurred that at first, he does not realize there are two people sitting at the table. He thinks there is only one. They have moved so close together, it is an understandable mistake.

Mark and Maureen are staring down at the set design for her latest performance, and this is not unusual, except that their hands are clasped together and their knees are touching underneath the table and they are looking more at each other than at the papers. Roger mumbles a greeting and Mark jumps, a little, at the sound of someone else in the room.

“Hope I’m not disturbing you,” Roger says.

“Not at all,” Maureen answers, but she is looking at Mark as she speaks.

After she leaves, Mark puts the papers away, and Roger looks out the window at Maureen sprinting across the street and asks, “Is she going to move in?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it.” There is a pause, and Mark puts on his coat. “Probably.”

“Are you in love with her?”

Roger does not know it, but Mark has never been asked this question before. The answer has never mattered before.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know anything,” Roger tells him, and turns around, leans against the window sill and tries to catch Mark’s eye. “Tell me at least: will she change your life?”

Mark cannot answer this question either, but he is afraid to tell Roger in so many words that he has no idea.

*

He came to New York hoping to meet people like her. Yet he never could have imagined anyone like her.

She is loud and free and passionate. She is uncompromising, powerful, sincere. She does not fear anything. She will not rest until the whole world listens to her. She draws him out—makes him on the outside everything that he is on the inside.

She pulls him up onto her stage after the performance. The crowd around them is cheering and the sound seems to amplify now, so loud it turns to nothing. He feels her take his hand and then they bow.

Later, the lot empties out. The people go home and those who do not have homes stay, lost in oversized coats, wandering and ghostlike in the background. They light fires that blaze up in corners and down alleyways. Maureen is stacking equipment. She has to yell at him twice to help.

She reminds him of old films. He wants to see her move in black and white.

The city gets colder at night and they walk down the streets with their arms around each other. It is late, the sky a dark black he never saw in Scarsdale, covered in crowded gray clouds. They go to the Life Café, sit at a corner table, pretend they are the only ones there. It is almost true. They order coffee. Mark uses the last of his money to pay.

Maureen is not the type of girl he could bring back home. His father would not want to meet her; his mother would not expect them to marry and move into a house down the street from the one he was raised in, the one he grew to hate. She tells him that she came to the city just as much to escape as to discover, and he is afraid that he can say the same.

Maureen believes in the impractical. She believes in the otherworldly. She believes in everything beyond the seen, beyond the known, beyond what can be proven.

Mark doesn’t know how to believe.

“You do,” she tells him. “You do, or you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be making your films. You wouldn’t be producing my shows. You wouldn’t be sitting here—”

She takes his hands.

“—with me.”

He doesn’t know why, but he feels his eyes slowly closing, and again that strange sensation (where the world around him slows and the voices fall away and the lights dim and only his sense of touch remains, still, unbroken) overwhelms him, and he hears her whisper.

“When your hands touch mine, they become wings and we fly.”

He believes her.

For the rest of the night, the belief in flight follows him. He swings her around in the middle of the street and kisses her beneath the moon that is coming out from behind the clouds. He doesn’t care that the people around them shove past and yell, because they are only so much noise and so much movement. They are nothing.

*

Mark can’t sleep.

Maureen is breathing quietly, and he knows she is not worried, not like he is worried. He’s still above the ground, but he’s not sure he knows how to live in the sky. There aren’t any curtains on the windows and the moonlight comes shining in, comes spilling in over her jacket on the chair, into his boots, across the newspaper with their latest reviews.

There is music—an eerie and almost beautiful progression of chords—coming from the other side of the curtain.

He listens to it for a long time before he even realizes it is there. Then he gets up, without thinking, gets dressed, without thinking, and leaves his room, without thinking.

Roger is sitting on the couch, playing the chords that fill the empty space and seem to change the very air. Mark sits down next to him. Roger does not acknowledge his presence, does not nod or smile or move his head. Neither speaks.

“Yes,” Mark says.

A frown passes over Roger’s face, mars it for a moment. Then he is calm. “What do you mean?” he asks quietly.

“Will she change my life? Yes.”

Roger doesn’t answer, only nods once. Mark doesn’t say anything more. They sit as the sky outside grows lighter, and Roger keeps on playing, quiet chords that make the rest of the world seem unreal.


End file.
